Imaging the Developing Heart: Combining Computing and Optics to Image and Quantify a Highly Dynamic System

Abstract

Microscopy and imaging provide some of the most visually exciting and scientifically informative data available to bioscientists. Many revolutions have happened in microscopy - from the development of fluorescent imaging to current advances in using artificial intelligence to give super-resolved images. But there are still many challenges that must be solved by the combination of clever biology, clever physics and clever computing - imaging the living, beating heart is one of them. In this talk, Chas will discuss the state of the art approaches to imaging the living, beating heart of a zebrafish - a model organism for many cardiovascular diseases. In particular he will focus on the work done here at the University of Glasgow where we are able to ‘computationally freeze’ the heart, quantify blood flow dynamics and take near-instantaneous 3D snapshots of the beating heart. These techniques are opening up new biology and medicine but the fundamental challenges require new advances in both physics and computing - a truly interdisciplinary challenge.